On Sunday, when thieves climbed to a second-floor window of the Louvre, grabbed jewels of staggering worth and descended to their getaway scooters via a furniture elevator, many in France were stunned and furious. But the German company that made the elevator saw a once-in-a-lifetime marketing opportunity. Alexander Bocker, the chief executive of the German machinery company Bocker, and his wife, Julia Scharwatz, recognised their Agilo truck-lift instantly, he said in an interview with Reuters on Thursday. A day after the heist, they rolled out a new advertising campaign on social media. “When you’re in a hurry, the Bocker Agilo carries your heavy treasures,” the ad boasted under a photo of the lift parked outside the Louvre. Their speedy marketing campaign captured an internet frenzy about the heist, which took less than 10 minutes and left no injuries except French pride. The company bought the rights to the photo on Monday morning after a bit of brainstorming by Bocker, Scharwatz and their employees. “We have even had feedback from abroad saying, ‘Hey, you Germans do have a sense of humour after all,'” Bocker said in the interview. Bocker said that they decided to make the ad only after it became clear that no one had been hurt, and they had not actively promoted the advertisement in France.Surgeons remove up to 100 magnets from teen’s gutA 13-year-old boy in New Zealand swallowed up to 100 high-power magnets he bought on the online shopping platform Temu, forcing surgeons to remove tissue from his intestines, doctors said on Friday. After suffering four days of abdominal pain, the unnamed teen was taken to a hospital. “He disclosed ingesting approximately 80-100 5x2mm high-power (neodymium) magnets about a week prior,” said a report by hospital doctors in the New Zealand Medical Journal. The magnets have been banned in New Zealand since Jan 2013. Doctors said the pressure of the magnets had caused necrosis – tissue death – in the boy’s small bowel and caecum. Surgeons operated to remove the dead tissue and retrieve the magnets, and the child was back home after an eight-day spell in hospital.
